Category Archives: Art

Art, caregiving, character, Christopher Cudworth, community, the Right Kind of Pride

Ten years on: and then some

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I am chagrined to realize that the last post I wrote in this blog was a year ago. On that front, I can simply state that my energies went into completing a book now published. It is titled Honest-To-Goodness: Why Christianity Needs A Reality Check and How to Make It Happen. If you want to keep up with that project and how it relates to the world we live in today, you can find me on TikTok as @genesisfix.

Today, on this blog, I have a testimonial to write. It has been ten full years on March 26, 2013, since my late wife Linda Cudworth passed away after eight years of ovarian cancer survivorship. She’s the reason I wrote the book The Right Kind of Pride, A Chronicle of Character, Caregiving and Community. The book talks positively about vulnerability, the aspect of character enabling people to be honest about their circumstances and trusting that other people will understand.

The actual definition of vulnerability is somewhat harsher than my description above. Vulnerability: the quality or state of being exposed to the possibility of being attacked or harmed, either physically or emotionally.

Perhaps that’s why people shy away from the idea of being vulnerable at all. Fearing attack for showing their true selves, they feel safer keeping their distance or even letting a sign of supposed weakness show at all.

We purchased her a bike to ride when neuropathy made it hard for her to do the daily walks she loved.

For us, I can testify that showing weakness turned out to be a sign of strength. We were blessed by the support of so many people that at times the help almost overflowed. That’s not bragging. That’s an expression of gratitude. Without the help of others through years of cancer treatments, chemotherapy, surgeries, medical challenges + emergencies, emotional breakdowns, loss of work, financial stress, and finally, a move into palliative care and hospice, those eight years would have been hard to endure. My brothers helped. Our friends helped. Even strangers helped. In some cases those people became friends. In others, they were practical angels when needed most. All were appreciated.

We made it through to enjoy periods of remission where things sort of felt normal. She got to attend school plays and concerts, see her kids graduate from high school and watch one of them graduate from college. She only missed seeing her daughter “walk” during college graduation by a few months.

So this isn’t a complaint or a “woe is us” moment. This tenth anniversary of her passing is a statement of respect and love. She lived as fully as anyone that I ever met. In fact, her example resonates to this day with all that knew her. I still get messages from people whose gardens still blossom with the plants she divided and gave them over the years. I also meet the parents of the former preschool students that she taught. They recall her kindness and loving nature with fond hearts and gratitude. Those were her two loves outside God and family. Her garden and her “kids” were always close to her heart.

The watering of her lilies and garden in late June.

She loved so many things that I used to kid her that I was glad to be ranked in her “Top Ten” any given week. She’d laugh a bit because we kidded each other often. But Linda was also known to have a biting sense of humor on many occasions. Despite her sweetness, there was a sharp intellect and cutting sense of humor inside her. She used it mostly with those she loved the most, creating inside jokes that made potentially dull moments more interesting. She’d also tease our kids sometimes, but mostly she found ways to praise them.

Our children Evan and Emily Cudworth posing for a Christmas photo with a Red Ryder BB gun famous from A Christmas Story.

She looked for ways to bring unity to many situations. During a family reunion up north in Minnesota, she wryly nicknamed the handsome young (often shirtless) dock attendant Mr. Boat. That was his job, fetching fishing boats moored away from shore, and whenever one of us wanted to go fishing she’d chirp, “Better call Mr. Boat!” Her powers of observation were that way about many things in life. She chose her favorite shows based on a high standard captured in the phrase, “This is interesting,” which was not given out to just any old show. Usually, that meant the show was either refined or educational. She also loved historical dramas such as Upstairs, Downstairs the series Downton Abbey, and nature shows narrated by Richard Attenborough.

And yet, she loved the silly stuff too, as with shows such as 30 Rock, where an episode could send her into fits of giggles if the absurdity caught up with her.

Nothing captured her imagination quite like gardening, however. She’d pore through catalogs seeking the best new plants, especially specimens few other gardens had. A walk through a typical garden center with her elicited winces and looks askance at the colorful yet commonplace pansies or petunias. Her garden pots as a result were works of genuine, living art. And once during my participation in an Artists In Action event in downtown Geneva, Illinois, her dried plant arrangements outsold my artwork by a far margin. I didn’t hear the end of that for quite sometime.

During one of our fall travels to the Morton Arboretum. A small portion of her ashes were discreetly placed in the Daffodil Garden.

I loved her for all these reasons. Yet I also knew that once the cancer diagnosis hit, it would be tough for her to live it out beyond a certain number of years. Had I not chased her to the gynecologist that spring of 2013, she might not have lived even a year beyond whenever it showed up at last. But getting checked out saved her life in many respects. It took aggressive surgery and chemo treatments to knock back cancer, but she/we did it time and again. She was tough as nails so many times. Even her doctor, a highly respected gynecological oncologist with many years of practice told her, “I don’t think I could do what you’re doing.”

A formal portrait from our church. We moved to a more open-minded congregation during the last year of her life.

That was her will to live at work. Obviously, I was her closest admirer, but there were many whose involvement in our lives proved vital to her survival. But by early March of 2013, when the medical oncologist saw that she could not rise from the examination table on her own, I was pulled aside to learn that it was time to prepare for the end. That’s when I really knew. It was time to say goodbye.

In truth, and I don’t say this with shame, I’d been preparing myself for many years before she passed. This is called anticipatory grief. It takes place when you see parts of someone you love being taken away. People dealing with situations in which loved ones or friends aresuffering from diseases such as dementia or Parkinson’s know the process too well. Bearing witness to the disappearance of that person you knew is painful. Indeed, my freshman-year roommate and running teammate Keith from Luther College was diagnosed with Parkinson’s not long after losing his wife Kristi to ovarian cancer. He dealt with its effects for more than a decade, including slowed speech and movement limitations. Yet he kept his wry sense of humor. Yet what a strange thing to have to happen in life. Those two 18-year-old kids that roomed together as cross-country teammates at Luther College could never know that both of our wives would battle the same disease.

My roommate Keith leading our team. I’m at left in the second group.

Keith and his wife Kristi had been together since they were high schoolers. She and my late wife had quiet conversations about their respective cancer journeys whenever we were all together at college reunions or other events. Recently, one of his daughters sent me a Luther College Bear made from some of his tee shirts. We keep each other company in spirit.

I wrote a poem about the anticipatory grief experienced in preparing for Linda’s passing. That’s the only way I could put all the thoughts together. I’ll place that poem here for your consideration. Perhaps you’re experiencing a change in your life that brings grief about in some way. I hope you know that you’re not alone. And if you feel moved to do so, you can share your experience at chris@christophercudworth.com. I’ve communicated with many people over these years. Sometimes it helps a bit to share.

Anticipatory Grief

At four o’clock a.m., she woke me from sleep

and shook a sheet of paper calling out, “I found the car!”

She’d been up for an hour researching new Subarus

on the Internet and that fact alone was shocking

because she despised almost everything

about technology and how it seemingly ruled our lives.

Our car is still rolling ten years later.

She dug into the website of Gerald Subaru to look through the selection of Outbacks and found the bronzy brown color she desired and printed out the sale sheet with all the stats so that we could go that day and buy the car.

Already we’d experienced the side effects of steroids

from the cancer that passed through the blood-brain

barrier even though it is never supposed to do that.

On December 26 we met with the neurologist

who explained the procedure he proposed

in fine detail, with the clamp on the head

for excision and radiation followed by

a prescription of steroids to stop the swelling.

Her personality grew my increments as the drugs

did their job, reducing inhibitions dramatically

as she spent money we did not have and looked up

cars that we probably should not buy

because I was taking time out of work

to care for her needs.

Like mother, like daughter.

Fortunately, my credit rating was so high up on the charts

that the car dealership didn’t ask too many questions

and we drove the new vehicle off the lot

with that strange sense of hope enhanced

by that new car smell.

She would get to ride in that car just three more times

as the steroids wore off and her body slowed down

unable to keep up with the rolling effects of ascites

and everything else that goes with ovarian cancer.

It had been years since her first diagnosis

in late spring when my mother also learned

that she was fighting a different kind of cancer

and my father was tied down with the effects

of a life-changing stroke.

Upon hearing these bits of news, a longtime coach

and friend called on the phone with encouragement

saying, “Your whole life has been a preparation for this.”

All that run training, patience, and perseverance learned in athletics

was called upon in caregiving for years to come.

There were late nights sitting in hospitals waiting

for surgeries to finish, and days spent perched

on partly comfortable chairs waiting for her body

to recover with some sign of digestive activity

usually indicated by a loud fart of some sort

at which the nurses often cheered.

We found humor where we could and between

repeated rounds of chemotherapy there were periods

of remission in which she could return to gardening

her primary love in life along with God and family.

Son Evan with Linda and Chuck, our dog.

My job was supporting these efforts no matter which direction

they tended to move, and without the help of so many

there were times when I might have frozen in place

lacking hope where there should be some despite all the worries.

The prayers piled up as high as they could go

and people even laid hands on her in a religious attempt

at ridding her body of disease, but she hated it,

the ceremony I mean, because it felt to her

like testing God, or what we knew of such things.

Her main goal was to be free of cancer somehow

and did not like being the center of so much attention

or the need to get so sick that life itself felt like a cruel prank

in the face of nausea, neuropathy, and skin peeling

from her hands as she was gardening.

Linda in her parent’s backyard on the 4th of July, one of her favorite holiday. But she loved them all.

Eventually, her hair was all gone and never came back

while the veins in her arms were so tired from injections

that the nurses had to warm and slap the skin

just to find an entry point for the medicine

or whatever one might try to call the poison

that cancer treatment so often requires.

The wigs she chose evolved from modest

to a bit wilder as she said “Fuck it!

I’m going to look like I want to look with the time that I have.”

Yet she was never negative, only resolute.

Visiting my Paoli apartment during our second year of dating in 1982.

For exercise, she wanted a bike because walking

numbed her feet so we picked up a matte green

Trek and she went pedaling on the Great Western Trail

while I rode along behind because I did not want

to pressure her to go too fast. That was how we proceeded

in many things, because I wanted her to last.

She let it all out that day with a burst of speed, clinging to the wig

on top of her head as the tires rolled on crushed limestone

taking her away from the feeling that life was limited.

I rode along behind feeling the breeze of anticipatory grief across my face.

In some way she knew what was coming as well,

and that Subaru was a last grasp at life itself.

A week later she could hardly get off the examination table

And by early March of 2013, when the medical oncologist

pulled me aside, there was true empathy in her recommendation

that we go to palliative care.

Sharing a kiss after I’d won a road race in 1984.

In many respects, I’d been there for years

because the woman I’d known, or the person she wanted to be

had been slowly stripped away by cancer’s rigors

and all that it represents. That means letting parts of yourself go

because there is no other choice.

She gave up calling me by the nickname “Lover”

and used the name Chris whenever we talked.

During those last weeks, I sat by her bed

asking forgiveness for whatever ways I might have failed her

if that was the case. In response, she turned to me and said,

“Oh, Chris, I’m sorry about all the stuff.”

She referred to all the keepsakes and everything kept in boxes

throughout the house from basement closets

to kitchen cabinets, and while she was no hoarder

I found more than thirty baskets in different styles

along with some money kept in quiet boxes

as a stash for new garden supplies.

Never did I begrudge her a dime spent on her love because

she’d sit outside facing her garden with a gin and tonic

admiring her work as the sprinklers graced the lilies

with moisture and the bergamot shared its wild bee scents

on summer evenings. Bats flew overhead and an occasional

nighthawk with its odd reaching up to a partial moon

as evening fell.

These things sustained her determination,

as she didn’t quit living even to the day she died.

We had to move her from the back bedroom

to a living room medical bed

and the EMTs rolled her through the house

on a computer chair in an act of inelegant

practicality. When she was settled back in bed

She looked up at me with a laugh and said

“I thought I wasn’t supposed to suffer.”

As the medical team went about its work that day

It was advice from her gynecological oncologist

that stayed with me. “This is coming to a close,”

he advised, “There’s nothing to be gained

in being negative. So be positive. Lie if you have to.”

Linda with my parents and Evan, our firstborn.

Those are the mercies of reality

because let us not fool ourselves with false positives

or true negatives. Instead, reckon with the truth

in each our own way. Years before, I’d ushered her

through an emotional breakdown brought on

by the fact that the cancer was back.

That truth was far too hard to condense

and much harder to swallow and I lost my wife

for a while to wherever the mind goes

when it can’t take it anymore.

A close friend and nurse then told me

“She’s going to need you now more than ever,

as her entire affect is off, and she’s afraid

of everything but you.” That was true,

so we held hands everywhere we went

until the shock finally wore off

and we invited short visits from trusted quiet friends,

those women she loved that could comfort her soul.

One of the many monarchs we “ranched” and released from her Batavia garden.

We never knew how cancer took hold, the disease

perhaps emanating from baby powder or talcum

as the legal advertisements later implied,

yet far too late for a cure, or recompense.

There is no room for second-guessing the past

when the future bears down on you from behind

and the difficult part about dealing with death

is how to handle it with children still facing most of their lives.

Surely, I did not handle that perfectly well

because anticipatory grief is an advance

salve for the soul before it all comes to pass.

That is also why on the week that she died,

I attended a Good Friday service and my brother told me,

“Dude, you’re walking straight into the pain.”

At the service, an interim pastor greeted me

with a tear in his eye and said, “It’s good that you’re here.”

Who knows the proper way to handle

the passing of a spouse of twenty-eight years

and four years of dating before that?

The immediacy of life’s endings all depend

on practical facts such as when

the afternoon nurse gives way to the night nurse,

and things seem to be winding down.

I recall her presence well, a slight woman with deep dark skin

and an even deeper appreciation of all that was about to transpire.

She stepped in the door and greeted me with something different

than a smile, but not sad, instead taking a long look across the room

at the woman in the home hospice bed breathing deeply.

Then she moved into the kitchen to prepare for the evening.

My son and daughter and I remained in the living room

with their mother and my wife for hours as her breathing grew heavy

and finally the night nurse came into the room and gestured to us

to gather at the bed, each family member holding a hand

or gracing her face with a kiss. Then it grew quiet

because there was nothing more to say.

I glanced at both my children, as each had come

from different places, one in New York and the other

from college to be back with their mother

who’d survived eight hard years to see them

grow into adults, or at least part of the way.

A trip to Chicago during one of her remission periods.

Then the arrangements began and we knew not what to do

but retreat from the finality of her last presence

as the funeral people took over for the transition to ashes

as were her wishes, but not her hopes.

That night the three of us could not bear to be apart

so we joined as children to watch the movie “Wreck It Ralph”

and its playfully destructive theme seemed just right

to distract us from the woes of loss and pain

and numbness, a heartfelt stain that does not always go away.

Our family was always able to talk

But never so amusingly as the day

that I dragged them all to therapy

when the news first hit

that Linda would be fighting cancer

and I wanted us all to be on the same page

in holding our bonds together.

They all participated patiently yet after the session

my son turned to us and said “I could have done all that.”

He proceeded to describe all of us in terms of personality

and how we got along and then he said some words

that I vowed to respect when he advised,

“Dad, just tell us the truth.”

That is what we all tried to abide during all those years,

allowing concessions for caution when the news

was not clear or the prognosis was still being determined

and only then could we be truthful enough

to offer direction, a parent’s prerogative.

The book I wrote about our journey.

These words are begging forgiveness for my own vain need

to tell all these stories as the means to process

what so many others go through in so many different ways.

I only hope they aid some others familiar

with these transitions in life.

I will also confess to needing affirmation on many fronts,

even going so far as self-aggrandizement on more than one occasion.

Also noted are mistakes made during all that caregiving

and one stands out in my mind, the day that she

needed to choke down the most awful liquids

in advance of a barium treatment test

and I grew impatient with her knowing

that her chemo regimen made even good food taste bad.

Yet I still stepped out on the back porch to chide her

with a call to just get it done. Her eyes flashed

and she raised two middle fingers with just two words

that to go along with that gesture,

and I deserved that.

The real object of her fury was the disease itself,

because it was the cause of all that trouble

and deserved to be told to go away

in the harshest of terms.

As they say, we “lost a good one” on March 26, 2013,

and yet there was one more moment of mysterious reckoning

when a friend of my daughter stayed over one night

as night as a gesture of support in the week following

her mother’s death.

The young woman lay on our couch with her feet facing

the spot where my wife’s head had been positioned

in the medical bed, when a set of three orbs of light,

one green, one white, one red, appeared glowing

in the darkness. Her scientific mind hesitated to tell us

that next morning, but we trusted that what she’d seen

was genuine and real.

A photo from our honeymoon taken at Waterton north of Glacier Park, 1985

These events form a helix of memories and realities

that we all seek to unravel with time, yet my perspective

on finality has forever been changed by the people lost

to life’s vagaries and its inevitable conclusion.

Call it anticipatory grief if you will, but I’ll not forget what

the night nurse told me after my wife had passed away.

“She was already gone before I arrived.”

A year after the world changed I sat next

to one of my wife’s closest friends who told me,

“You know, she told me that she knew you’d date

after she was gone.” I thanked her for that,

but related that I was glad she waited to share

that information because we all still need to make

our own decisions in this world. They are often

no easier to make than any other, and whether

we lose a wife or a father or mother,

there still remains a path to walk or run

and it takes resolve to not come undone.

appreciate what love means, Art, Christopher Cudworth, its a wonderful life

I’m in love with stacey’s mom

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See that iRobot® Roomba® coursing through our dining room? That’s a recent addition to our household, purchased by my wife to sweep up dog hair and detritus on the downstairs floors.

Our Roomba is named Stacey.

She named the Roomba Stacey. “I don’t know why,” she told me when I inquired about the name. “It just seems to fit.”

This is not a paid endorsement. The arrival of Stacey in our household is a direct result of my wife getting sick of looking at dog hair around the house.

My wife also loves a good bit of technology. She taught our musical friend Alexa to instruct Stacey to begin her morning rounds at 9:00 a.m. The sound of Stacey whizzing around bumping into walls is audible for an hour as we work in our respective home offices upstairs. Then Stacey rolls back to her dock to charge up for another day. That makes my wife so very happy.

Tech woman

That’s not the only tech my wife adores. She’s got a heart monitor for her many workouts as an Ironman Triathlete. She wears a sleep monitor strap to track the quality of her overnight rest. For everything else, we have Garmin tech to measure swims, runs and rides.

You might say Data is her friend. But I’m her husband. And I’m in love with Stacey’s mom.

When we first met we kept the “L” word off the table for a year or so. She was coming off a divorce and I was a relatively recent widower. But the more time we spent together, the more commitment we felt. She even asked the point blank question: “Are you sure you don’t want to date someone else?” I said no. Then after a year or more, one or the other of us said the word “love.” From then on, we didn’t look back.

Guilt factor

I’ll admit that it’s still a little hard to write about the L word in relation to my wife to this day. Having loved my first wife for twenty-eight years of marriage (and four years of dating before that) through the day that she died of ovarian cancer, there’s a touch of guilt associated with proclaiming love for this woman to whom I’m now married. But loving again has nothing to do with not having loved the person before her. If anything, it affirms the fact that love is real, and that I’m capable of it.

That’s the right kind of pride.

Love talk

So I’ll say it again. I’m in love with Stacey’s mom. Here are some of the things I love about her.

We laugh together in the car quite often. To stoke our conversations, I’ll raise an idea about some doubtful topic on purpose that she inevitably swats down with a bit of joyful skepticism. “No…” she’ll intone when I gigglingly make an inane statement, “That’s not how that works.” Then we riff on the subject by making even more jokes about it. I love that in her.

I love her head to toe. She takes good care of herself and we have an affectionate relationship. I love giving her hugs and feeling the strength of her back and arms and the warmth of her arms around me. When I give her massages her leg muscles feel like broad ropes or sheaths. Over the last eight years, I’ve gotten to know her typically sore spots earned from workouts in swimming, riding and running.

Sudden smile

She has a sudden smile that attracted me instantly on our first date. That smile is my reward for pleasing her or making her laugh. She often compliments me on finished projects when we’re working on around the house. Hearing her say, “Nice job, honey,” is one of most satisfying statements a man can hear.

Artful minds

We enjoy seeing aspects of the arts together. Exhibitions. Musicals and concerts. She knows music well and though she’s a bit younger than me, our musical tastes line up well. Except for certain artists. She’s not a fan of Todd Rundgren or Dan Fogelberg, for example, nor Rufus Wainwright. So I don’t tell Alexa to chime those up unless I want to tease her. Then I might tell Alexa to play Dan Fogelberg’s “Longer” and give her an Ear Worm for the next day or so.

The dance of life

I like how she dances too. Her moves are both alluring and demure at the same time, and when she’s lost in the music, she doesn’t care much about whatever else is going on. “Dance like no one is watching,” is the popular phrase, and I follow her lead. Catching the shine of her eyes while we’re dancing makes my heart jump.

And I’ll also say that I’m ardently, physically attracted to her too. Even with all the images floating past our eyes in this digital day and age, it is the site of her that makes the sap within me rise. We lose ourselves in each other.

So while the song “I’m in love with Stacey’s mom” celebrates cross-generational lust through the naive notions of a young boy fixated on a friend’s mom, there are more ways than one to love a woman.

And I’m in love with Stacey’s mom.

Art, character, Christopher Cudworth

Through the eyes of children

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I’m not a big believer in the idea that the deceased are able to talk with the living. No amount of talk by so-called “mediums” convinces me that people in this life can connect with the dead through supernatural means. I once read that a famous celebrity promised his wife that if he died, she would someday see his presence revealed in a white feather floating in the air. I don’t think that ever happened, or we might have heard about it.

Instead, I believe that when it comes to all things supernatural, it is up to us to find meaning in everyday experiences that trace the lives of those we have lost. Yesterday, I felt the strong presence of my late wife in a teaching experience with children the same age that she once served.

As a substitute teacher the last month and a half, I’ve had the opportunity to work with classrooms ranging from first grade through middle school and high school. Having been in many teaching situations over the years, including adult and higher education, I’m exploring how I can expand that love of teaching at this point in my life.

It has been a challenge and a joy to learn how to work with students of all ages and abilities. Like my late wife, I’ve also worked with special needs students across a range of abilities. Her ultimate career choice was a preschool teacher, a bit different than the higher-paying public school positions to which she once planned to return, but her love of teaching young children won out.

I always knew why my wife loved teaching children that age. They are getting ready for the big world of kindergarten. They need guidance in social skills as well as basic learning in the alphabet and numbers. They also love to explore the arts and play.

As a teacher one learns to adjust to aptitudes and witness how personalities are already forming. It is also a calling to help form those personalities in an encouraging way.

That means you use what talents you have available to connect with kids. For me, that means read-aloud time and drawing. Those are my best teaching attributes. While moving from group to group during play time, I shared some drawing time with a left-handed little guy who absolutely loved the process of copying what I drew on the board. At one point I drew the head of a mouse. He then completed the body and legs, and drew a companion mouse next to the first.

Such are the serendipitous arrivals of teachable moments. Sometimes you make them happen. Sometimes you let them happen.

Over a twenty-year period my late wife experienced thousands, if not millions of such encounters. Those kids were a gift to her in life. Though her life ended earlier than she ever planned, the children and raised (our kids) made it the richest life imaginable. She saw it through their eyes, and the purity of the moment is made from the absence of time. It will be eight years since she passed away on March 26, 2013. It was nice to feel a bit of connection with that life through some preschooler’s eyes.

Art, caregiving, Christopher Cudworth, the Right Kind of Pride

Teaching and learning

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The kids in the INCubator program at our local high school.

A number of weeks ago while speaking with a friend who runs the INCubator program for high school students in which I’ve served as a Mentor and Presenter the last five years, we talked about how schools are adapting during the ongoing pandemic.

“A lot of people are out,” he told me. “We need subs.”

Getting certified

I dug into the requirements to become a substitute teacher and learned that people without a teaching degree can register to become a short-term substitute. That means teaching according to the lessons plans provided by the full-time teacher.

It took several days to fill out and submit the paperwork, gather transcripts from college and high school and file it through the Illinois website. Then I needed to register through the county website and get fingerprinted. Finally it was time to fill out the district paperwork.

Much of that signup could be done online. But wanting to put a face with a name and forms, I stopped at district offices to meet briefly with human resource directors. It is always good to become a known quantity.

I was impressed with the relative efficiency of all that registration. The districts I’m serving also have a great way to sign up for substitution assignments.

Middle school subbing

My first days of teaching were in middle school, running physical education classes all day, managing a language arts class and becoming a “floater” as teachers were getting vaccinated and needed someone to oversee class time and assignments.

Conducting a live art instruction at the Candlelight Dinner Playhouse for an audience of 900 children

I’ve spent many hours in classrooms and teaching in other ways over the years. My late wife was a special education teacher for ten years and a preschool teacher for twenty. She asked me to teach her class now and then. My mother was an elementary school teacher for twenty years. I visited her classroom many times to talk about birds, art or other subjects. I’ve also been a guest speaker for the “art people” trained by the Art Institute of Chicago to share art with student at all grades. Some might say teaching is in my blood. Perhaps it should have been my profession. But it’s never too late to start…

Learning abilities

My next round of assignments were in an elementary school two miles from our house. At the front desk, a fellow substitute and I met with a teacher and administrator to determine who would take the music or ILP classes that day. ILP stands for Individualized Learning Plans, a term describing students with specific needs. My mother often tutored children in our home that needed individualized learning. She’d tell me, “These are your classmates, and you can go out and play after their lessons, but you need to let them learn while they’re here.” She also told me to keep their tutoring a private matter. “They learn differently than other kids,” she explained.

To some degree, I was one of those kids too. Only late in life did I ascertain that there is a certain amount of attention-deficit disorder at work in my brain. Looking back at my education years, I now recognize patterns of difficulty, obstinance, and outright frustration or failure when it came to certain learning circumstances. I’ve had to work a bit harder than others on certain kinds of tasks, and build discipline and good habits into my routines. I take pride in that now.

I think it can be accurately stated that every human being on earth has some kind of learning disability if a fine enough focus is placed upon it. Some excel at math and stink at English. Others love the social sciences and history while some find it excruciatingly boring.

Individualized Learning Plans

I chose to work with the ILP children earlier this week even though teaching the music class that day seemed like it would have been fun. I’ve played in bands and can sing fairly well, but I knew that past experience in classrooms with special education children would help me help them.

The ILP teacher walked me through the day’s lessons, materials, and tools used by the students to practice and learn. Each child had their own ‘best practices’ to follow. They took pride in pulling out their respective memory cards, books, and speaking devices.

The first boy I worked with was a charming child with Down’s Syndrome. He applied himself with energy for the most part, with only occasional drifting or distraction. His favorite part of the lesson was going through a series of slides depicting people expressing different kinds of emotions. While he did not recognize all the words, some of them were pretty long, he loved working with me to imitate the facial expressions and body language of the kids in the photos. We had a particular laugh at my imitation of the person exhibiting a ‘dubious’ expression. I turned my head to the side and lifted my chin, looking at him out of the corner of my eyes. He came back to the slide several times to coax me into the dubious mode, and we’d laugh all over again.

Then it was time fo reading, and he read me a book about a cat named Puff who liked to hide.He pulled out another book about a Mama Bear gathering berries, nuts and fish for her family. We talked about why the characters liked to do what they were doing.

Teaching is about helping people make connections.

By then he’d earned his ten stars for progress and I moved his behavior code up to blue from green, a promotion! He’d been good for me. Then he could grab his Chromebook and spend time with Baby Einstein software. He plunked his fingers on the screen to make a pool of faux water send ripples all around. It looked like fun. And gratifying.

Speed it up

The next student on the morning’s schedule was a charming young girl who arrived at class upset about something that had happened on the way to school. She was comforted by the paraprofessional and following a quick hug and a reminder to wear her mask the proper way, she got her stuff put away. When it came time for me to learn with her, she informed me that I was dawdling with the word cards. “Too slow,” she frowned. We sped it up.

Later when I needed help getting another student logged into their Chromebook, she washed her hands first and jumped over to log him in. I thanked her, and she asked, “Are you going to be here tomorrow too?” She was missing her regular teacher, I knew. “Probably not,” I replied. “But I want to thank you for being such a good helper today.”

“I like to help,” she chirped, then hurried to her cubby to prepare for recess and lunch.

Non-verbal

Some of the students in class were non-verbal. We worked together on reading. I was quite impressed with their ability to key in words and letters and hear them read aloud by the device. One of the students keyed in the entire first half of the Dr. Suess book Green Eggs and Ham. You know the one: Sam I am. When he finished reading, I hummed a little tune, and he hummed back. I’d noticed that he was singing to himself before class. Why not speak the same language?

Autism

The fifth child was the most challenging for me to teach. Instead I tried to learn from her. Her autism gives her a keen energy and a need to jump up now and then. She engaged in some massively dreamy stares at times. I thought about her parents and how much they must want their child to learn on her own terms.

We read two books together and my instructions were to ask her to speak clearly, well above a whisper. She did fine with that, but ultimately felt like she’d had enough and pulled out a sheet of paper to repeatedly “knuckle” a symbol in the middle of the sheet. She wanted something specific to happen, but I could not tell what it was. One cannot learn everything a student needs or wants in one session. We do our best, and move along.

Toward the end of our fifteen minute session, she broke free from all of that and leaned toward me to study my face or simply break the tension of having someone new in her presence. It felt to me like she had three strong signals going through her brain, competing for space. I don’t know if that’s an accurate description of how autism works, but I could relate to that, and perhaps that’s what counts.

The teachers who work with these students have the knowledge, compassion, and commitment to help children learn despite their supposed limitations. That’s all that any of us can do. Keep on learning. That’s the Right Kind of Pride.

Black History month

I closed out the day teaching a class of first graders about Ruby Bridges, the American civil rights activist whose brave story of being the first student to desegregate a Southern school was read aloud in a video we watched together. I paused the video to ask the children how they would feel in Ruby’s place. We also looked at a painting of Ruby walking to school in the company of federal agents. That tomato smashed against the wall held so much symbolism.

That story has taken on greater meaning in the last year with civil unrest unfolding around the rights of Black Americans that have been threatened or killed by police, chased down by vigilantes or otherwise abused by institutional racism in the United States of America.

I looked around at the kids in that class. They were the same age as Ruby Bridges, six years old, when she dared to learn in the face of massive bigotry that unfortunately, has not dissipated in the country where she continues her work in civil rights. Some lessons take so long to learn, while some people just refuse to learn them.

That’s not what I saw in the eyes of the children in class that day. It is a gift to be present for that.

Art, community

an invitation to share in the hobby of a lifetime

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I started actively studying nature through birding at the age of twelve. That’s when my eldest brother came home from college after taking an ornithology class. His interest passed to his three brothers and we initially drove the country roads outside Elburn, Illinois with a set of 10 X 50 Sears binoculars and a Peterson’s Field Guide to the Birds.

Earlier in life, I’d been given one of those bird guides by my mother’s older sister. So the seeds for an interest in birds were planted well before I ever came of age. This 20-minute video explains that journey and how my interest in bird identification and art ultimately merged into one hobby of wildlife painting.

Video on bird ID and Bird Art by Christopher Cudworth

From the age of twelve on, I drew and painted birds all the time. Initially, my efforts weren’t that impressive. Back then, resources to copy weren’t that available and I didn’t own a camera. So I drew what I’d call “impressions” of birds from bird guides and the creatures I’d seen in the wild.

Over the years, as I learned more about birds and got a camera, my paintings somewhat improved. Yet one of the key learning tactics was copying the work of other artists such as Louis Agassiz Fuertes, as I did with this watercolor of a great horned owl.

Great horned owl by Christopher Cudworth, aged seventeen.

The progression of an artist from copying the work of others to producing definitive work of their own is in some ways a lifelong endeavor. Yet once I graduated from high school and entered college, I started that process in earnest. I took an internship trip to the Cornell University Laboratory of Ornithology and studied the works of dozens of famous wildlife painters. While there, I drew birds from life in the raptor center at Sapsucker Woods.

Gyrfalcon and peregrine studies from life.

Once the process of creating my own work as in full swing, I took on the project of creating a set of life-sized murals for the Lake Calmar Nature Center. That involved painting four 4′ X 8′ panels in a month-long January Term project. The photo in the newspaper shows the relative scale of these paintings.

Christopher Cudworth circa 1977 with wildlife murals.

An article appeared in the Cedar Rapids Gazette that winter. It stated my life’s hobby in pretty succinct fashion.

Article on teaching the balance of nature with a brush.

I’ve gone on to sell hundreds of paintings in my lifetime. All along, it’s been my goal to teach others to enjoy wildlife and appreciate the diversity around us. I do that by leading field trips, citizen science projects and sharing work in shows, exhibitions and classrooms.

Now, I’m going to launch a new venture called a Patreon site. It will be a combination of my two deep interests, nature and art. Here’s a quick sample of the content that will appear on that site, a demonstration of how I draw and paint a kestrel while explaining some facts about the bird.

Video sample of upcoming Patreon site for Christopher Cudworth

The site will be launching on the 15th of January but I’m giving readers of this blog a “sneak preview” of what is to come. I’ve always felt it’s important to share and give back, and this site will be a great way to interact with people who appreciate and support my work. I’ll send out an invitation on the 15th when the site is officially open. We’ll be doing live painting sessions through Zoom with Covid-safe, remote “painting parties” and more.

Thanks for reading The Right Kind of Pride. Now let’s create some things to be proud of together!

Art, character

The migration from lust to artistic appreciation

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My rendering of a female figure from a life drawing class in college. There was seriously not a trace of lust in me while creating this image.

So many of us are taught to not feel proud about having sexual feelings. Yet human beings are biologically wired to have sexual attractions of one form or another. Many of these are characterized as taboo or against the teachings of a particular religion. We’re told these feelings are sinful and are thereby urged to repress some of nature’s most powerful instincts.

Feelings of sexual desire are loosely characterized as “lust,” a word that bears a negative connotation in context with scripture and other moral guidebooks. To “lust” after something is characterized as a craven or base instinct, something to be resisted. The website Biblestudytools.com describes it this way:

Lust is a temptation and an evil that overcomes many of us. It is born of Satan and the flesh. Every single one of us is subject to lust. If we are to overcome it, we must be strong. Use these Bible verses to find out why you should resist lust, and use them to strengthen yourself.

The quote attributed to Jesus in Matthew 5:28 is most often cited as a directive to resist lust at all costs:

28 But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.

A drawing I produced from a Playboy centerfold when I was a sophomore in high school. There was definitely lust involved in producing this drawing.
This is an image of the centerfold from which I rendered the drawing above. The beauty of the female figure is aptly captured in this centerfold.

Yet the natural curiosity to know more about the human body isn’t just about lust. There is also appreciation involved. Even scripture recognizes this aspect of adoration in the Book of Psalms, where a lover clearly lusts for his divine partner:

“Your breasts are like two fawns, twins of a gazelle.” (7.3)

“Your stature is like that of the palm, and your breasts like clusters of fruit.” (7.7)

“My lover is to me a sachet of myrrh resting between my breasts.” (1:13)

Okay, so now we know that exploring and expressing lust is not all bad. Many of us recognize its allure within us from a young age. I well recall, at the age of eight or so, reaching into my father’s closet to pull down copies of Playboy magazine. The sight of naked women fueled my desire even before I entirely knew what to do with it.

The drawing of Playboy model Claudia Jennings that I produced in 1972. It also drew from lust, but it was more than that as well. Look at the clothing…
The centerfold on which the drawing above was based.

So strong was my urge to understand the female body that I took to tracing outlines of those women on the pages of Playboy. I stored those tracing paper drawings in the depths of my closet and returned the magazines to my father’s room.

I even drew images of naked women on the steam-covered bathroom mirror. On Sunday mornings the sight of Blondie’s buxom figure on the cartoon pages even got me going. I copied those cartoons too, but not only those. I began to replicate all sorts of cartoon figures on my own. I was learning to draw. To appreciate what I was seeing. That gave me a sense of ownership and power over my observations.

By the time I reached my early teens, I was drawing and painting regularly. My mother bought me paints and paper. I rendered wildlife that I’d seen and copied pictures from books. My desire to capture the essence of birds and other creatures was a lust of sorts.

A 1973 watercolor of a great horned owl copied from a painting by Louis Agassiz Fuertes.

As a sophomore in high school my drawing skills began to come together in all new ways. In a fit of drawing immersion combined with lust, I rendered highly-detailed copies of centerfolds from Playboy magazine as shown above. I didn’t always get the face quite right, but doing the shading on their bodies was captivating.

This is the same model as the drawing at the top of this blog. I produced this single image from a long series of separate drawings. The female figure celebrated.

Then I reached college and took a life drawing class. My curiosity about the female and male body was greatly satisfied by drawing live figures. There was no lust in this brand of appreciation. My entire focus was on rendering the human figure with accuracy, detail and subtlety. This applied to both men and women.

It struck me as odd that when I arrived back at my college dorm room, male classmates would gather around to look at the drawings I’d done that day. To many of them, the images constituted “naked chicks” and while I laughed about it then, my interests were migrating from lust to appreciation.

Not long after college I hired a model on my own to pose nude for an afternoon drawing session. She arrived at my studio apartment, disrobed and posed on the couch, and left at the appointed time. I compensated her for the time, and did not feel any particular lust for her body while doing the drawings.

The model I hired to pose for a life drawing session. It is an interesting reflection of the piece I created from the centerfold years before.

Yet I can’t honestly say that I never looked at pornography again. The nature and accessibility of naked images, especially of women, evolved with technology. I did a search of Playboy centerfolds and can identify the year and month that I last purchased that print magazine. It was 1994. In a strange twist two years after that, I was parked in a White Hen lot and looked down to find a Playboy magazine sticking out from beneath the parking block next to the sidewalk. I pulled out the magazine and was stunned to see that it was dated 1976. Patti McGuire was the centerfold. Had that magazine survived under that block for twenty years? I doubt it, but it was still strange to find it there.

These days it’s not just Playmates who show up half-naked or completely naked in the digital and real world. World-class athletes on social media know that a touch of sex sells. It’s part of the gig to attract followers, be they males lusting after fit girls or women appreciating the hard work it takes to look like that.

World-class female athletes know that a touch of sex sells when it comes to gaining followers.

Society has grown to accept the sight of fully exposed female buttocks as a natural part of empowered fashion. Social media encourages nakedness at many levels, including women that willingly pose without clothes or get involved in the porn industry to make money. It’s seldom glamorous, as Rashida Jones shared in a telling Netflix series.

Exploitation, whether by self-choice or by revenge porn, is a far different enterprise than building appreciation for the human body. Some of the world’s greatest art features nude human beings. That is an accepted part of culture. Yet there’s also no avoiding that lust drives considerable occupation with the human figure as well.

A pencil drawing of film star and sex symbol Marilyn Monroe.

I think the right kind of pride sits somewhere in between the worlds of lust and appreciation. Maintaining that balance is a sign of maturity and self-actualization. When I consider the manner in which attractive actresses are expected to bare all for movies, it makes me wonder how they feel about having their naked bodies out there for all of eternity. Women such as Marilyn Monroe were supposedly able to turn that lust magnetism on and off. It was a persona, they say. And yet, we tragically learned, it also wasn’t.

A drawing from a Playboy photograph rendered in the 1970s.

We all conduct our own mind experiments and learn our flaws and obsessions. The range of human sexual expression, orientation and gratification is far more diverse and appreciated now that society is becoming more honest about it. Clearly we still have a ways to go, and some argue that sexual images and exploitation are signs of a morally decaying society. Yet knowing about sex and having a better understanding of the human body ultimately empowers everyone in the end. Being educated and making choices is better than being repressed and succumbing to fears, guilt, and mistakes in conscience.

Ancient attitudes of automatic repression and hardline theology don’t do people any favors. They depend on a brand of hyperbole that comes from an age when sexuality was poorly understood, and lust along with it. It’s not true that people conduct adultery in their heart every time they look at a woman (or man) lustfully. Sometimes it’s just that: a look to wick off desire. Then we get back to appreciating the ones we love, and even making art that inspires appreciation of the human condition in all its forms.

That’s the right kind of pride.

Art, the Right Kind of Pride, trusting science

The art of not being famous

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Last Friday night I sat down to check email one more time before relaxing for the evening. There was a message from a website called FineArtAmerica. A woman named Delinda was writing to inquire about a painting that she owns. This is what she wrote:

Good day,
I am inquiring about this magnificent print of yours, titled on back in handwritten notecard, reads:
Great Horned Own with Red Phase Ruffed Grouse. 3/5 life size.
Curious, it says ’78 perhaps as a date? I can send pics if you need to see it, hoping to get more info about who it may have been commissioned for, or if its just a random print?  I love it so much, its so lifelike it scares my cat lol.
Thanks in advance,
Delinda

This is a watercolor painting of mine from 1978. I produced it and sold it during a show in the Preus Library at Luther College just before Christmas.

The painting was a labor of love a long time ago. It bears similarities to a watercolor by an artist that I admired and emulated. His name was Louis Agassiz Fuertes, one of the greatest bird artists that ever lived. I’d gone to Cornell University Laboratory of Ornithology to study the work of Fuertes and other great bird artists. I did my best to absorb what I could from studying their work close up.

My aspirations were to become as great a bird artist as I could. This particular portrait was a refinement of an earlier study I had done. I also executed an ink drawing of the same pose. But the pose originated from a painting I produced as a freshman in college from a stuffed great horned owl borrowed from the biology lab. That painting copied the mussed up feathers verbatim, a condition that a live owl would never likely allow to happen.

The great horned owl painting produced in 1975 from a stuffed specimen.

When I showed the 1975 painting to Dr. Lancaster, the Director of Laboratory of Ornithology, he blurted, “That’s some of the finest featherwork I’ve seen.” I took that as a kind compliment. Clearly he saw my potential, but also noted that much further study of birds was in order to become a fully accomplished bird painter.

That I continued to do. But the challenge was finding suitable resources. I’d learned taxidermy in college, but it was illegal to collect and own dead birds of any kind. Still, I collected specimens and kept them in our second freezer for reference. I owned a camera with a 300mm lens but never seemed to get good quality photos to copy. Plus it takes years or genius to absorb and render the “true” lines and forms of birds in the wild.

The years passed and I produced hundreds of paintings of varying quality for patrons public and private. Almost all of those are in the possession of people whose whereabouts I do not know. Occasionally I’ll be contacted by someone who wants to know if I’m still painting. We have a good chat and they send me a picture of the painting they own. That makes me feel good. Someone prizes a bit of my work.

I’ve even gotten calls from strangers who came into possession of one of my paintings. One of them started our phone conversation with a question, “Are you famous?” They’d picked up one of my watercolors at a garage sale of a couple getting a divorce (I remember the couple) and wanted to know if the painting they’d purchased for $25 was worth a bunch of money. “I hate to disappoint you,” I related. “But I’m not famous.”

Last year a friend found one of my paintings at an antique shop in Michigan. They were browsing the store and saw a painting of an eagle that I’d painted long ago. I’d done the work on commission for Robert Van Kampen, a patron who went on to sell his investment company to Xerox for $400 million. He hired me to do a series of hawk paintings when I was 18 years old. Somehow it escaped his estate and has been kicking around antique shops the last forty years.

Last Friday night, I wrote back to my new friend Delinda thanking her for getting in touch with me about the owl painting from ’78. She explained how she came to own it.

“So happy to hear from you! I live in San Diego, ocean beach, and people leave things in alleys all the time. The owl I’m guessing was from someone older who may have passed away. I’ve had it for about 5 years now. It was in an alley for about ten seconds before I grabbed it, others really wanted it too but I won lol. I knew it was special, and would be happy to return to you if you’d like it, or donate to the school or elsewhere that might appreciate it. Otherwise, I will cherish it forever, as I love owls and birds! XO”

I told her that I wanted her to keep it for as long as she wanted it. We agreed that if I get out to visit my son in Venice, California, we’d get together as friends and share a drink by the ocean.

That’s the most an artist can hope for in some ways. That the work builds connections. I’ll not pretend that I became one of the world’s greatest bird artists as I once believed was possible. But I also haven’t quit. These days, with the camera and lens I now own, and ability to collect good reference material, my work has improved and continues to do so.

I may never be a Louis Agassiz Fuertes. No one ever will. But I can be the best Christopher Cudworth that I can be. That’s the art of not being famous. And that’s the right kind of pride.

Painted in 2015 from a photo of a great horned own at a local forest preserve. The composition is fuller. The rhythms of the bark and the markings on the owl match.
Art, biblical literalism, character, community, the Right Kind of Pride

Finding a way to make things work out

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Over the past winter the coffeehouse where I often go to work and write was closed for a complete remodeling. They stationed a smaller store a block away while the expanded Graham’s 318 Coffeehouse was being constructed. But it was a test of patience and timing while the new store was being built. The City of Geneva is pretty picky about its appearances and historical feel, yet Graham’s and the builder Hogan Construction made it work.

Then when it finally opened, the Covid Crisis hit. That delayed things again. Now the business is operating at full function allowing for masks and social distancing.

It has always been a welcoming place. There are regulars who work here daily. During peak hours the bustling background of people coming in and out of the restaurant acts as white noise to a writer. They don’t play their music too loud or too soft. The vibe is one of community. They even serve Two Brothers beer along with their incredible menu of coffees, teas and food menu.

Long-time associates

I’ve known the owners Bob and Beckie Untiedt for perhaps 20 years. We were members of the same church. They led an exceptionally well-run Praise Band in which my son played bass and cello. Then my daughter followed suit playing violin, but she was never much of a fan of praise music with its repetitive chants and predictable key changes.

That didn’t stop me from joining the group later on as a rhythm guitarist. I’d grown up playing clarinet and participating in bell choir in elementary school. Come high school, I learned to play some guitar chords with a group of friends and even performed a few songs for our Key Club banquet. That went horribly. Following that, I let the instrument go for twenty-plus years until my daughter asked for a guitar and I started playing again.

Joining that Praise Band was a humbling experience. My brain does not memorize music well. Some of the chords I was asked to play were difficult for my knuckle-cracking fingers to accomplish. But Bob and Beckie were patient and encouraging. After a year or two of being in the group, they even urged me to perform a song I’d written. So we practiced and had a go at it. I recall singing somewhat tentatively in rehearsal that morning and Beckie was direct and real with me. “You’re going to have to sing clearer than that.”

That was the point, after all. The song was titled Flowering Tree In Spring, a piece I’d written from different aspects of my experience. Perhaps it was also a competitive attempt to write something better and less repetitious than the praise songs we played so often.

The first stanza lyrics introduced the metaphor:

Have you gazed in wonder at a flowering tree in spring?

no petals yet have fallen a perfect, holy thing. 

If life were just that simple, no rain or wind would blow

then we might be as perfect as a flowering tree, you know. 

The song came out really well. I think Bob and Beckie have always appreciated the idea of people trying new things. Their businesses of Graham’s Chocolates and 318 are a living example of that. As a result of their considerably novel approach to business, these businesses are lively fixtures in the communities they serve. They also provide work for dozens of employees of diverse backgrounds and needs.

Yet the thing that I appreciate most about them is the impish brand of honesty one finds in Bob and the earnest commitment to quality in Beckie. Their business was recognized by the Geneva Chamber for its contributions to the community.

Appreciation

The Untiedts (center) with daughters Jaynie and Maddie. Kane County Chronicle File Photo.

Bob’s impish side is not directly revealed. I well recall playing a song in Praise Band by the musical artist Bruce Cockburn. Whether intentional or not, that act was a bit of a thumb in the face of the conservatism of that church, whose pastors often preached against homosexuality. Cockburn is gay, and performing his song in that church was something that I relished whether it was a closeted protest on the part of Bob or not. It was for me. All I can say is that Bob often had a wry smile on his face the days we played that song. But then, Bob always has a wry smile on his face. That’s who he is.

Beckie is kind of the opposite type of person, with an open-faced honesty for which she is both apologetic and unapologetic. If that sounds contrary, so be it. She’s a person of strong faith, but no stuffed shirt either. I recall the night that she was singing when one of the cups of her underwire bra broke, sending a sharp bit of metal into her side. She let loose a surprised yip and then starting laughing along with her Praise Singer sisters while trying to push the whole contraption back into place.

Musical talents

It was always astounding to me to watch their respective musical talents in action. Bob could sit and play songs on the piano seemingly out of nowhere. He’d transcribe chords for all the instruments from one key to the next, and orchestrate the parts of bass, rhythm, drums, lead guitar and piano in real-time. I don’t think in musical terms like that, but I can keep rhythm with the best of them, and that was my role.

Beckie is possessed of one of the most beautiful, clear voices one can imagine. There were nights while playing the guitar in practice that I’d get distracted by her lead vocals. Along with the harmonies of the gals singing with her, one could not help but listen. But then, I’m always easily distracted. Still, I once broke script in rehearsal and told her that she had one of the most wonderful voices I’d ever heard. She was a bit taken aback. Perhaps it was a bit too laudatory. Yet if someone doesn’t express appreciation for the good things in life, events roll by and things like that never get said.

Eclipsed by circumstance

That is why I felt horrible a few years ago when I was invited back to play with the Praise Band and was given a lead part to play on the rhythm guitar and things got out of hand.

The main song I was asked to play was one of my favorites and it went well in rehearsals the week before the service. But the morning of the performance I was also scheduled to do a live painting in front of the church and things got a bit chaotic setting up the easel and floor coverings while also trying to get ready to play the guitar. It was so noisy around the front of the church I went out to the narthex at the last minute to tune my instrument. On the way, I accidentally bumped the settings on tuner and changed the readings of the pitch. Not knowing that had happened, I tuned my guitar to the wrong key and returned to the front of the church to begin the service.

To my horror, I knew within two bars that my guitar was badly out of sync with the rest of the band. The only option I knew was to stop playing. Actually I faked it a bit at first, strumming nothing, then looked at Bob with a guilty shrug and mouthed the words, “Out of tune.” There was no time to explain. He covered my parts with some creative piano playing but to this day I get a queasy feeling every time I think about that moment.

That made it tough to concentrate on the painting process as well. The flush of embarrassment was still on my neck and face when I stood up to begin the painting. There was pressure to complete the picture in the few minutes allotted for the performance. It came out okay, and people were gracious, but I knew it wasn’t my best effort. It was all a lesson about being present in the moment.

It was also a lesson that taking chances and trying new things comes with some risk. I’m pretty sure that Bob and Beckie know better than anyone else I know that not everything we try in this world comes out a success. The story behind the scenes of life and work is often chaotic and challenging. In the end, the public face we present is the product of both determination and patience in the face of adversity. Along the way, we hope to celebrate the joys as well as endure the failures. That is how our true character is formed and emerges.

That is the right kind of pride. Finding a way to make things work out despite the frustrations of life is what it’s all about.

Art, Uncategorized

Happy Anniversary to us

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Chris and Sue and wedding too
Our wedding was held in an art gallery where I was a Resident Artist.

Seven years ago I visited a website called FitnessSingles.com. At first, it did not seem too promising. There were women all over the country, but only one in Batavia, Illinois where I lived. She looked cute enough; blonde hair and an athletic build. But I thought to myself, “That’s too convenient. She’s probably just an Avatar to get me to subscribe.”

But when I clicked on her photo the profile came up. “Huh,” I said out loud. “She’s real.”

We had our first date at a local restaurant and ordered drinks and artichoke dip. And we talked and talked. She looked quite pretty heading into the restaurant with curly blonde hair and a summer dress. I sat across from her at the table and wondered how it would all turn out.

It happened that a middle school teacher that had taught both of our children was seated with her husband at the next table over. She glanced at us a few times and finally connected the dots that we were out on a date. “Oh that’s great!” she chimed in. “You guys have a lot in common.”

Chris and Sue
Riding together in Arizona. 

It turns out that we do. Our first official date was a cycling ride in the countryside. She was fit for an upcoming half-Ironman so I had to ride pretty fast to stay on her tail. And that tail looked pretty cute in her bike shorts. We sat down for a break on the lawn of a high school out in the cornfields, and she asked, “Have you ever been out here?”

I replied, “I went to school here for three years.”

And that’s how our relationship proceeded. The more we talked, the more it turned out that we knew many of the same people. Both our daughters attended Augustana College. All our kids went through Batavia High School. And once they met, they all got along well together.

Which was a joy on our wedding day three years ago when they all joined in the wedding party and we celebrated joining our families together.

IMG_4411
Our wedding party consisted of our kids, boyfriends, and siblings. 

That is not to say there are no challenges to melding families. We’re like every married couple in having to figure out financial plans, living arrangements, and work-life balance. We’d done many things right and a few things wrong. Celebrating a happy anniversary is as much about working at marriage as it is about having a perfect one.

She came from a divorce. I came from the loss of a wife to cancer. Both of us had grief and some anger to work through as we figured our way forward from that first date. So we took our time using the “L” word because that puts a bit of weight on things as you begin to share worlds.

 

We began to share friend networks. She introduced me to her triathlon clan and I introduced her to my longtime buddies that had shared high school sports and college and lives together. That first Labor Day we traveled to Wisconsin and rode the Wright Stuff bike event, camped in tents, and hung out with a gaggle of teenagers grabbing a last bit of summer before September took over.

It all felt right. We kept on with our respective parenting duties as her kids migrated from teenage years to college with the typical bumps in the road. My children wrestled with memories of their mom and seeing their father in a relationship after their mother’s passing. I may have taken things a bit quickly but have no regrets in that aspect of life. I loved my late wife fully, and for 28 years.

I now love my wife as a wholly different person and in many respects, an essentially different life. To put it simply, I appreciate my Sue for the person that she is. That she is attentive and sincere. That she tells me she loves me. That she is disciplined in her health and fitness and flexibly devout in her beliefs. We’re a good pair, if I may say so myself.

Proposal photo 2
Our engagement was at a triathlon camp in Arizona. 

Recently, on the cusp of all this Coronavirus stuff, we were scheduled to head down to Tucson for a triathlon training camp. That afternoon, the term “social distancing” first flew into the public sphere. As we rode to the airport, questions began to arise in our minds about whether we should go at all. But the airport was largely vacant, and the fellow passengers respectful of space, so we traveled there and back with no incident.

It made us think about how difficult it might have been had the virus struck while we were on a cruise trip in Europe last October. Her mother took us all on that adventure, and we jumped on and off the ship on day trips touring Naples, Florence, Pompeii and stops in France and Spain. It was a wonderful lark and one we never imagined. It kind of served as a belated honeymoon for the two of us.

But being on a cruise ship during a pandemic would not be fun. So much of life is like that. There’s a certain amount of risk in everything we do. Often the question of safety or wisdom is about timing or dumb luck. Had each of us not gone on that website the day we connected our lives would have spun off in different directions.

That’s why every anniversary is meaningful. Not every moment in life is happy, but we can be happy in having lived every moment, and appreciating them for better or worse. Doing that together is what life is all about.

Art, Christopher Cudworth, Uncategorized

Approval at last for a bird nerd

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When I was five years old, my mother’s sister Carol handed me a copy of Peterson’s Field Guide to the Birds. Somehow she knew that I’d be interested in the subject. Over the years I purchased many other field guides that improved on the methods of the original book developed by Roger Tory Peterson. Yet I owe a sentimental debt to that first copy. It fueled my interest and taught me so much about the natural world.

Peterson's guide
The original Peterson’s Field Guide to the Birds given to me at five years old.

With an early passion for drawing, I began tracing the birds in the Peterson’s Field Guide with a special focus on the hawks, which drew my attention the most.

Peterson Hawks
The visible tracings of hawks in my first Peterson’s Field Guide to the Birds.

By the time I was twelve years old I was painting and drawing birds on my own. And when my eldest brother came home from college on fire with interest in birds after taking an ornithology course, we all went out in the field together to identify every bird we could find. These I marked down with eagerness and pride.

Birding List
A chronicle of species seen as recorded in the back of my Peterson’s Field Guide.

Among my friends, the interest in birds was at that age a point of teasing and ridicule. The nickname “Birdman” was applied with some disdain. But I ignored those supposed insults and kept painting and drawing birds because frankly, I was by then making some money at it.

Through high school, I found a mentor in Robert Horlock, a biology teacher with whom I spent hours in the field. He introduced me to other birders. That led to my first engagement with Citizen Science as a founding member of the Nelson Lake Marsh Bird Survey team that tracked breeding and migratory species in a newly established wetland preserve. We participated in annual Audubon Christmas Bird Counts as well, a commitment that lasted for thirty consecutive years.

LMBST
The zones of the marsh marked out for the Nelson Lake Marsh Bird Survey Team.

That bird survey team was one of the first times in my life that a seemingly childish interest felt validated in the adult world. My ability to credibly identify birds was respected by the adults with whom I met on a quarterly basis. My trips afield for that purpose felt serious and important. I was contributing to the preservation and conservation of something that I really loved. And having fun doing it. That was the right kind of pride, I thought.

Admittedly there was some ego involved in all my birding and art pursuits. As a young man with a strong need for approval, the praise earned for finding bids and doing artwork was a prized reward. So were the bragging rights in having seen twenty species of warblers on a cool spring morning, or calling in a peregrine falcon to the Rare Bird Alert phone line that served as the Internet for birders before the digital revolution began.

Bankswallow7
A bank swallow in full sunlight. Photo by Christopher Cudworth

The thrills of birding over the years have included rare species that turned up at odd times. I wrote an article published in Bird Watcher’s Digest last year documenting the day that I found a European Stonechat in Illinois. It was the first of its kind seen in the Lower 48 United States. Lacking a camera on-site at the moment––it was before the era of cell phone cameras––I rushed home to do a painting and share it online. But unfortunately, the sighting could not be officially recognized by the Illinois Ornithological Union or any other organization because the bird was never viewed by another credible birder. Those are the rules. So the thrill of finding such a rarity remains a pleasure of my own accord.

Stonechat Paintings
The watercolor sketches I did of the European Stonechat found in Illinois, 1998.

These days I am well-equipped to document everything found in the field. Perhaps my obsession is in compensation for the frustration of losing that sighting of the Stonechat to the ether of personal history. I geared up over the years with a high-quality spotting scope to which I attached a series of digital cameras to take pictures of birds. Finally, I purchased a 150mm-600mm Sigma camera lens to use with my Canon camera. It’s not top-end gear, but it is fun to capture images of the birds I’ve studied for so many years.

Pelicans Flight 2
A flight of pelicans over Peck Farm Park lake in Geneva, Illinois, 2019.

It would have been nice to have that kind of camera in my early years of birding when I tried so desperately to find “references” for my bird paintings. Back in the 70s and 80s when wildlife art was a big scene, it was artists with access to detailed photography that won the day. I tried to replicate that process over the years and finally produced some relatively solid work using my own photo references. But by then the market for bird paintings was waning. Digital photography now makes wildlife imagery so commonplace that entire sites on social media fill daily with photos of birds and other creatures. In many respects, the thrill that once came with celebrating those insights of nature is gone.

Bald Eagle Painting
A bald eagle painting by Christopher Cudworth, 24′ X 36″, 2012

That said, my interest in birds has matured. My fascination now is with their behavior, and I still love leading people into the field to share in the thrill of seeing species of birds they never imagined existed.  My personal life list of American species sits just below 500 and I’ll happily accept any new species that comes along. But that’s a rarity for sure these days unless I travel to a new place such as the Pacific Coast, where I hope to bird some day.

Coopers Hawk
Painting of a Cooper’s hawk by Christopher Cudworth. 

I’ll still paint birds and have a library of 20,000 images from which to work. It is a catalog of the time spent outside staring through optics and camera lenses at living things that deserve to be protected, celebrated and appreciated. I guess that’s enough approval for a bird nerd at last.

Chris Headshot

 

Christopher Cudworth is author of the book The Right Kind of Pride on Amazon.com.